Google Street View: Miami Vice

The mapping service Google Street View is in the news for capturing a little too much detail in one of its images — a Miami woman who had the bad timing to walk outside her home stark naked just as a Google Street View car rolled by.

For the moment, let’s not ask what this woman was even thinking when she exited her home as her maker intended. Instead let’s focus on the repercussions of such an action in the 21st Century.

Google

Somewhere in that blur resides our Venus d’Miami.

A blog called Random Pixels wrote a post on Friday. Cue media storm. “Type 1760 Northeast 66th Street, Miami, FL into Google Maps. Go on street view and zoom in,” Tweeted TimGrimes1 and probably hundreds (thousands!) of citizens with little to do save for look for naughty parts on Google Street View.

And like that, our Venus d’Miami became an international star.

Google moved to blur the naughty bits of the image. By this morning, her image was completely blurred. A Google spokeswoman told Digits that Street View software blurs the faces of individuals as well as vehicle license plates. She said that the service also makes it easy for people to request that certain images such as their home or vehicle or even themselves get further obscured.

Given the fact that Google has a never-stopping fleet of cars, SUVs and even tricycles plying city and county streets worldwide, capturing street-level imagery for its mapping application, it is not surprising that every once in a while, Google is going to turn up something, um, interesting.

Last summer a 10-year-old girl was caught sprawled on the sidewalk in Worcester, England. Concerned neighbors called the police, believing that the cameras had caught a dead girl.

There are no indications that Ms. Miami intentionally walked out of her house for her 15 minutes of fame, but Google Street View has been targeted by pranksters who have done everything from chasing cameras with spear guns to putting on some sort of neighborhood-wide “tableaux” of surreal scenes in Pittsburgh, Pa.

While this episode reads like a bit of harmless fun, Google Street View has found itself in a heap of trouble over the years. Various countries in Europe and Asia have initiated privacy investigations against the search giant, claiming that Street View conflicts with privacy law.

And in May 2010 Google earned an investigation by the FTC when it admitted its Street View data collection activities inadvertently collected emails, passwords and other private information from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. Google said the purpose of the system was to determine the location of Wi-Fi connections to improve the function of its location-based applications. Google has since stopped the practice.